The Shores of Morning

I

The hesitancy of waking
surfacing from the depths
up and through the dreaming sea
out onto the surface of sleeping.

The desire to remain floating here
just drifting where the tide takes me.

The dream reaches out, clutching
at the slow fading memory,
wanting to drag me back down.

The calmness of drowning.
The insistence of temptation.
The desire to end all desires.
The destruction of need.
Never needing to surface again.

II

The day calls to me from the land.
I break the surface again, look ashore
at the strange familiarity of my life.

Safe from the whimsical logic of dreams
the ordered insanity of daily existence
is protected from the charms of fantasy
by the prosaic rites of normality.

Slowly, I swim for the shore.

The fingers of the mermaid clutch
once at my ankle, then are gone.

As I wade toward the beach of morning
I turn, glance back over the sea
to see the dream, floating away
on the receding tide of the night.

I see the mermaid wave, only once
before she dives back into my seas.

III

With my mermaid I could swim forever
as we explore the depths of my dream sea,
together over rocks, reefs and my sunken wrecks.
Never again surfacing for the dawn
Or to return to the shores of daytime.

Out in the deepest of the dark seas,
far from the headlands of dawn,
the mermaid is waiting for me
and she sings her morning song
about how I no longer need
the ground, solid underfoot,
or to breathe the morning air.
We can float forever
together on the tides,
let the currents take us
flow with the shifting shoals of fish.

IV

It would be easy to swim
in the eternal dreaming sea.
Go where my seas take us
far from the day's shore.
But the shore always drags me,
as it drags the reluctant waves,
back towards the waiting shore.

I sigh and slowly climb
the steep beach of morning
back over the shifting dunes
to the land of ordinary life
where time always waits for me
to turn moments into useful days.